Google SEO News and Discussion Forum

The thought went through my mind that Google's cluttering of page 1 results with directories , You Tube , Wiki's etc etc and whatever else that will occur in the future will push users more onto the 2nd page for organic results.

It might be good for Google in the short term, but the deteriorating quality of the page 1 results could eventually cause people to go elsewhere for their searches. They especially need to get rid of You Tube.

The thought went through my mind that Google's cluttering of page 1 results with directories , You Tube , Wiki's etc etc and whatever else that will occur in the future will push users more onto the 2nd page for organic results.

Depends on what you're searching for. I haven't noticed any deterioration of Page 1 results in Google. Quite the contrary: They tend to be far better than they were a few years ago, when the Page 1 results from a search for "Hotel Whatsit" or "Widgetronic W-1000" would be packed with affiliate and dealer pages.

Also, believe it or not, some of us like seeing Wikipedia results on Google's SERPs. In terms of relevance, they're nearly always spot on, and they tend to be informative and useful.

they're nearly always spot on, and they tend to be informative and useful.

Does that include the plagiarized stuff, and the factual inaccuracies?

In the past couple of weeks I have had opportunity to read a couple of dozen wiki articles. Time and again I have seen content literally cut and pasted from other sites - often, but not always, manufacturers sites. Also had opportunity to see articles flagged for being biased, and have come across any number of serious factual errors in areas that I have some knowledge in.

The wiki experience is deteriorating. Hardly what I would consider "best of class" for many searches.

I HATE video results inside the google SERP's pages. I have NEVER found the need to click on one of the video results when doing a search. If I want to watch a video about 2 teenagers driving a maxima, I'll go directly to youtube, metacafe etc and search for it. 99% of the videos that crop up in the web results are not valuable to me and offer little to no relevancy.

As the web grows in size, and computer screens continue to have constraints in pixels, the amount of real estate is fairly static. The average Joe and Sue User "get it" and if they are not vid nuts will auto click to "2" to get to the meat.

The real problem we, as webmasters" have to deal with is how to get "widgets" to the top of the other 12M other "widget" sites offering THE SAME EXACT info. Hence SEO and all that other stuff.

Walk into any big city central library, or a large university library and find what you are looking for... just a visualization of what the web has EXCEEDED info wise.

I generally find the best part of what I'm looking for on Page Two... or Page One of Bing which is a few petabytes shy of G's older database which continually offers cached pages from dead websites more than 10 years old. So yes, in my opinion, jockeying for a spot on page two is the next "holy grail".

Google would be fine if they would simply boot every (useless) shopping/comparison site from their results.

I'm all for that. Trouble is, a lot of the useless shopping/comparison pages (and mislabeled "review" pages) are on otherwise legitimate sites like CNet and ZDNet that have useful, up-to-date information on other pages. Filtering out junk sites shouldn't be too difficult, but separating the wheat from the chaff on important mainstream sites is likely to be more complicated.

Sorry... for me "more" is not "more relevant". I go with the defaults (like 99% of the visitors do) and work from there. Then again, I know how to craft a query to get what I want... which Joe and Sue User might not know how to do.

Since we cannot control the order in which we display, I for one and opting to not have a strategy for this... ;-)

Can you imagine the SEO 2.0 sales pitches... "Ranking 11th is the new 1st! We can guarantee your site shows up at the top of the new valuable 2nd page... we'll also throw in some free internal no-follow link sculpting if you buy now!"

I have a page that consistently ranked in the top seven or eight spots for the term "Acme widgets." It now ranks #12-#13, yet traffic to that page hasn't been affected. My guess is that it's only ranking on page 2 on a couple of datacenters. Maybe not.

As for the quality of the page one results, for this search I was bumped by an online magazine article on the Acme company from two years ago, a wiki article, and a couple of other low-quality results.

You have to realize that Google is stat driven. They know what they are doing. They test everything. If things don't work they take them down. They are not like most companies who just make random decision based on the feelings of the person who signs the pay checks. If something stays up after a year it must be working and what people want.

If something stays up after a year it must be working and what people want.

Yes and no. i think this is true for popular searches that have a lot of statistical query data deciding what is relevant to users and what is not.

However, people type an enormous amount of wierd, random and poorly-worded queries into search engines. I think a lot of irrelevant search results are delivered to users every day because the queries they enter are NOT popular, but rare.

Google can't make any sort of solid statistical decisions about queries that only get searched 5 times per month.

If something stays up after a year it must be working and what people want

not so sure about that. for example, whatever stats indicate that youtube videos in the front spots is what people want. now look at those people. mainly kiddies? be it the majority likes the current serps composition. what if there is a strong influencial or well-funded minority opposing?

or on the other hand, be it solely for the money: take some of the lower standard spam-like adsense ads: economically they work, too - but people hate them.

there are short-term and long-term perspectives to consider. short-term financial gains may result in long-term user aversion. short-sighted marketing decisions may result in people clicking less ads or turning their back on google search. especially in this point, you can't tell me google knows everything about their visitors and does everything right. in fact, i see a weakness here.

No google does not look at every possible search but they look at trends. If they see that something is not working they take it away. I'm not going to say Google can't do something. They have some smart people that could write algos that can figure out a lot of things. They can split things up into themes. We know they can do this. I have listened to several talks given by Google employees and they talk about comparing extremely minute things like a few pixels of white space and how well that does. From my experience listening to these people and reading what they say Google is very serious about experience. They are not going to put anything up and forget about it. They test everything. They collect data from everything.

I think some of this may be to do with increasing numbers of people learning to use the search engines more effectively. After a while people realise that the first results aren't always the most relevant for them, so they go to page 2.

My 2 page 2, spot 11 results are some of my more popular pages. Hard to say whether other factors aren't at play. Result spot 9 for another page is also a more popular one. But again, there are probably a few variables coming into play here to make it hard to say that it is solely spot 11 bringing the traffic.

For example, one of my page 5 results is just as popular.

Search volume, result placement, incoming links, traffic from these links, email referrals, etc... all come into play and it's hard to say exactly which one is the winner.